News Coverage of Relay Attack Article by Dr Murdoch

A recent article by Dr Steven Murdoch has been covered by The Register and the Daily Mail. The article discusses how previous work on bank card relay attacks by Dr Murdoch is still relevant. Relay attacks work by rerouting the communication between a customer's card and the Point of Sales device, sending it to a different terminal, and charging the customer for a different transaction. The initial research was based on chip and PIN cards and proposed a simple solution: the transaction protocols would require fast replies so that relayed communication would fail.

Contactless cards present a harder challenge: their operating power is limited, and the timing of wireless communications standards is less precise.